On Twitter recently, people were talking about historical novels, of which we have something of a glut right now. What were their favourites? Wolf Hall was mentioned, of course, and so were books by Dorothy Dunnett and Mary Renault. Distracted, I began to draw up my own top five, a list which comprised, on that particular morning: The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, Regeneration by Pat Barker, Possession by AS Byatt, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and (would this be top?) Katherine by Anya Seton.
Katherine, published in 1954 and never since out of print, tells the story of Katherine Swynford, the mistress and later the wife of John of Gaunt, the third son of Edward III. When we first meet her, this daughter of an obscure Flemish herald is straight from the convent, unformed and naive. However, her sister, who is betrothed to Geoffrey Chaucer, is a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and as a result, Katherine marries Sir Hugh Swynford, a Lincolnshire knight; only after his death do she and John, whose attention she first attracted at court, take up with one another, by which time her temples are streaked with white (“swan’s wings”, as John puts it).
Seton, an American writing pre-Betty Friedan, doesn’t give Katherine the anachronistic feminist impulses so beloved of many current novelists – a relief to me. Nevertheless, her heroine, from whom the Tudor kings would ultimately descend, has her qualities, among them not only her loyalty and stoicism, but also a convincing eye for intrigue and how best it might be survived.
I’ve no idea what I would have made of Katherine had I read it for the first time as an adult; I must have been about 13 when my father gave it to me, telling me I wouldn’t be able to put it down. But whenever I come back to it, older and supposedly more sophisticated, its castles, knights and wolfhounds still work their magic, for all that I see, now, Seton’s tendency to breathlessness.
It’s one of those novels from which you emerge feeling slightly dopey, as if waking from a deep, dream-strewn sleep. Something about it invites both the suspension of disbelief and a girlish ardour that seems, in my case, to be extremely long-lasting.
